When the smoking ban came in, I remember every pub and restaurant proclaiming that it would put them out of business; and many, including many an MP crying personal freedom and choice. You’d feel differently if dying, or watching a loved one dying, of a smoking-related disease. Hard now to imagine eating or drinking in a fug of smoke, as it will be, I predict, to think of being close enough to breath in a fellow diner, drinker or festival-goer’s Covid breath in years to come. Much as the expression irks, it is now, and will be for the foreseeable, the new normal.
“The working-from-home illusion fades”
Are workers working from home more or less productive than those catching the 7.02am to London Bridge every day? ‘Probably sitting at home in their bleedin’ jim-jams’, said someone recently of a less-than-helpful call centre employee, the assumption being that, were they surrounded by colleagues and with a manager cracking the whip, he or she would have sorted his energy bill more efficiently.
